Women Debate the Status of the American Man

In this month's Atlantic cover story, Hanna Rosin
explores "The End of Men." She looks at a few statistics:

Earlier this
year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in
U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men
who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same.

In trials for a new sperm selection
method, Rosin reports, parents request girls at a rate of 75%. Rosin also tosses in
some anecdotes: stories of unemployed, divorced fathers attempting to
make their child-support payments and business school classes trying to
teach men the "feminine" skill of "social intelligence." Boys and men,
she notes, are also increasingly found to have difficulties in school.

All
this, Rosin argues, leads to the conclusion that a gradual shift in economic and social power is underway. Particularly due to the recession and the increasing importance of
fields dominated by women (including "nursing, home health assistance,
child care, food preparation"). She asks, "What if modern, postindustrial
society is simply better suited to women?"

But The American Prospect's Ann Friedman
isn't buying it. "It's not the end of men," she declares flatly in her
response to Rosin. Her main problem with the thesis is simple:
"Rosin makes the same oversight as all of the other hand-wringing
articles about the state of the American male. She thinks the problem
is men; really, it's traditional gender stereotypes." The very notions
of male and female Rosin relies upon to declare female ascendance are based,
in fact, on a "narrow, toxic definition of masculinity ... that men are
brawn not brains, doers not feelers, earners not nurturers." In this
sense, she also finds Rosin's article peculiarly anti-feminist; its
"underlying assumption" is that women are actually better-suited to
those "nurturing professions" like teaching and nursing that are on the
rise.

Friedman also points to a few areas where women remain at
a disadvantage. For example, while "college-age women tell [Rosin] they
hope to become surgeons and marry men who will be primary caregivers
... research shows ...they tend to marry other high-achieving men who
expect their own careers to take precedence." Friedman also works in a
telling observation: "Rosin's piece, I should note,
appears in The Atlantic's annual ideas issue, in which only three out of 15 'ideas' articles are written by women."

To conclude she points out a tricky paradox at the heart of Rosin's argument:

If
the, as she terms them, omega males of Knocked Up and The 40-Year Old
Virgin are representative of the way men live now, shouldn't they be
ideally positioned to take advantage of the nurturing and cerebral jobs
that are the core of America's new post-masculine economy?

News reports are focusing on the Germanwings pilot's possible depression, following a familiar script in the wake of mass killings. But the evidence shows violence is extremely rare among the mentally ill.